All 18 of New Hampshire’s silver-haired bat records were made in August, and 16 of them in Hillsborough County. A pattern that tidy doesn’t mean the bat keeps an August-only schedule. It means somebody ran a focused survey, most likely a netting or acoustic project, and caught a species that’s otherwise nearly invisible to casual observers.
A frosted forest bat
Dark fur tipped with silver gives this bat its frosted look, and old trees give it a home. It roosts alone beneath loose bark or in a woodpecker hole, then hunts moths and other night-flying insects over calm water after dark. The suggested country fits that life well: the Lakes Region’s broad bays, Umbagog’s wooded shoreline, Great Bay’s quiet coves. Where still water meets mature forest, this bat finds both a roost and a feeding ground.
Breeder or traveler?
NatureServe ranks the silver-haired bat S3B in New Hampshire, vulnerable as a breeding species, which means the state treats it as more than a fly-through migrant. With every record squeezed into one month and one county, the honest position is uncertainty. August is when this year’s young take wing and when fall migration begins to stir, so a single survey could have caught residents, travelers, or both.
Status in New Hampshire
The bat is native, globally secure, and clearly present, yet it hasn’t been recorded in the state since August 2021. That’s a documentation gap more than a warning sign. A few nights of acoustic monitoring in other counties would very likely widen New Hampshire’s map of this frosted little forest bat considerably.
Full species profile
